Retribution Paladin in Dragonflight & War Within: A Reflective Analysis and Wishlist

With the sun setting on Dragonflight and The War Within on the horizon, our Retribution Paladin Writer, Bolas, offers a retrospective highlighting Retribution's journey in Dragonflight and shares their hopes for the spec's next evolution with a War Within Wishlist. 

Dragonflight has been a wild ride as a Retribution player, with periods of some of the most sweeping changes a spec could possibly get as well as long periods without any attention, a rapid ascent to the peak of the damage meters and a slow fall from it. This article will give an overview of Retribution's evolution in Dragonflight, the issues it's faced at various points, and what the outlook is like for the future.

• Pre-Rework

The earliest version of the spec wasn't around for long, but looking at it helps gives some context around decisions made during the later rework. Ret had a pretty uneventful start to Dragonflight. Its new talent tree was essentially a rehashing of old talents, conduits, and legendary effects without much new innovation, and its playstyle was extremely similar to what it had been in Shadowlands.

• Mobility & Survivability

In Vault of the Incarnates, Ret ran into a plethora of problems with its toolkit at the time. Many bosses in the raid had some form of knockback effect, which Paladin is especially susceptible to, including Raszageth where you couldn't even live without external help as a Paladin early on. On top of that, Ret had extremely poor defensive capabilities, to the point that it had by far the highest death rate of any spec in Mythic at the time. Ret had serious problems even just participating in Mythic content at a basic level.

• Devotion Aura

Although Ret technically could be brought as a raid buff, this was not realistic in practice - almost every raid already used a Holy Paladin, and not running Retribution Aura came at a sizeable throughput loss.

• Talent Builds

Ret essentially ran the same talent build for all content, with only a point or two of adjustments made per fight. This was mostly because the best single target and best AoE build were almost entirely the same build - talents like Final Reckoning and Sanctify were the best single target options to take as well as being excellent on AoE.

• 10.0.7 Rework

This rework completely overhauled the spec, adding a ton of new talents and abilities and removing many older ones. It also fundamentally changed a few aspects of the playstyle in some significant ways. I won't cover all the changes here, just some of the more notable and impactful ones.

• Tuning

Directly after the rework, Ret was absurdly overtuned - it was the best DPS spec in almost every situation for about a month, until the Unholy buffs in mid-April. This drew a lot of new players to the spec, especially since it was a relatively easy spec to pick up, and just is fun to play. However, the rework changed how well Ret improved with gear significantly too - Ret became a spec that does relatively high damage at lower item levels, but as item levels rise it doesn't improve at the same rate as most other specs do. As a result, its performance has dropped as item levels have risen both between tiers and during a tier as people acquire new gear. This meant that new players picking Ret up did very high damage on it even without having full Mythic gear, but this didn't translate into Ret performing especially well in Aberrus or beyond.

• Defensives

The rework introduced Sanctified Plates as a passive, as well as letting you have access to both Shield of Vengeance and Divine Protection at the same time with lower cooldowns than before, on top of some extra bonus abilities like Guided Prayer. With these additions, Ret now had multiple active defensives it could use effectively, as well as suddenly becoming incredibly tanky even without defensive usage. Ret also started valuing Versatility as a secondary stat much higher after the rework, which provides a significant defensive bonus in itself too.

• Crusading Strikes & Templar Strikes

Although Crusading Strikes is the more commonly used one recently, both styles of Crusader Strike replacement have had their time in the sun since the rework. Previously Crusader Strike was a really bad filler button - you'd press it when you had to just to generate Holy Power, but its damage was comically bad. These replacements helped to solve that by either massively improving the base ability, or removing it from your rotation entirely by providing passive Holy Power generation.

• Vanguard of Justice

Holy Power spenders now cost 4 for most builds rather than 3. This is a big change to get used to when you're used to spending Holy Power in 3s for years, and many players still heavily dislike this talent and prefer to play without it even at a small damage loss. I respect the attempt to create some new playstyles for Ret, but I don't think this one has worked out in the long run and I think most players would prefer to go back to always spending 3 Holy Power at a time.

• Boundless Judgment & Improved Blade of Justice

Going from a single charge of Blade of Justice that generated 2 Holy Power to 2 charges that generate 1 each felt very weird, as did Judgment now generating 1 Holy Power, but I think that this has turned out to be a good decision. I like that players have more choice when deciding how to focus their build, whether they want extra charges on abilities to fill rotational gaps or want each individual use to generate more. I think they're probably a bit unbalanced at the moment though, since Boundless Judgment is much stronger than Improved Judgment because of Divine Resonance, and Art of War makes Blade of Justice charges more valuable as a buffer for cooldown resets.

• Avenging Wrath & Crusade

With the rework, the base version of Avenging Wrath had its cooldown reduced to 1 minute, while Crusade stayed at 2 minutes. This made Avenging Wrath the default choice for almost every situation, since having a half length cooldown that also worked well with Divine Toll is a huge advantage. Crusade has seen some niche usage since, but Avenging Wrath has been dominant in almost all content.

• Divine Arbiter & Burning Crusade

The bottom half of the Ret talent tree is now split between a Holystrike side and a Radiant side. I was hoping that these would have some interesting build implications, but they've unfortunately ended up being almost entirely passive bonuses that are almost exclusively useful for either single target or AoE with little crossover.

• Was the Rework a Success?

This is a pretty complicated topic to cover, and I think what you care about when playing the game will heavily influence how you view the state of the spec. I'm going to cover a few different issues that the rework attempted to address, and a few probably unintended consequences of some of the decisions made.

• Defensives

At the time, Ret's main issue was simply that it struggled to participate in difficult PvE content in the same way that other specs did. The rework absolutely knocked this out of the park. Looking at the death rate in raids at the time change really tells you everything you need to know.

Ret went from the DPS spec that died the most often to one of the least likely to die. This is a obviously a massive buff, but given Paladin's relatively restricted movement abilities I don't think this is necessarily an unreasonable state to be in. To me, the defensive changes were a resounding success.

• Mobility

Although Ret didn't receive any major direct changes to mobility like the Heroic Leap clone that was datamined, we did receive something pretty significant: a very long range. Everything other than auto-attacks and Crusader Strike can be cast from at least 12 yards away, and even those have their range extended by Crusader's Reprieve as well. Being able to leave melee range and still do the majority of your rotation is incredibly powerful for a melee DPS, and it can often let you play in ways that other melee can't to bait mechanics or spread for an AoE effect. As far as substitutes for direct mobility abilities go, I am very happy with how this experiment has turned out.

• Raid Buffs

With the rework, Paladin now had two raid buffs that most raid groups would want to have, leaving it in a uniquely privileged position as the only class that you'd want two of. This has restricted the ability to change raid composition even further, but I think the main driver of this change is Holy Paladin. You can't really consider Devotion Aura to be a Paladin buff when Holy Paladins have been a permanently locked spot in almost every Mythic raid comp since the beginning of time, so rather Retribution Aura is a Protection/Retribution/Second Holy Paladin buff.

The addition of Retribution Aura as a raid buff has certainly helped Ret to see more use than it did previously, since groups without a Protection Paladin or a second Holy Paladin are now happy to have one, but Protection is certainly the default second Paladin slot in almost every situation due to how strong Blessing of Spellwarding is and its strong offhealing capabilities. I am reluctant to call this a resounding success from a Retribution point of view since it has mostly just restricted raid compositions even further and elevated Protection Paladin, but it has still made Retribution a more viable option in some situations as well, so I would not call it a real failure either.

• Talent Builds

The reworked talent tree was designed to have some talents that are very clearly single target focused like Execution Sentence or Divine Arbiter, and some that are very AoE focused like Final Reckoning or Burning Crusade. The idea here seems to be to move away from the generic "good in all situations" builds that were just the best regardless of the number of targets, towards talents that you would change frequently depending on the fight.

This has been a complete and abject failure. You still run the exact same build in almost every situation in raid, but it's not because that build is the best choice for any target counts - it's because any of the AoE talents you could take come at a substantial single target damage loss, and even if you do decide to take some number of them, they won't even significantly improve your AoE damage. I do not understand how the spec has been allowed to be this poorly designed or tuned in this regard for this long without it being addressed at all; it's truly baffling.

For an example: On Tindral in 10.2, a top parse would be around 310-320k for a Ret running full AoE talents. For a Ret running single target talents, a top parse would be somewhere around 275k. But when you look at boss damage, the ST Ret would be doing over 200k while the AoE Ret would be doing at best 150k. You're essentially trading off over 25% of your damage to the boss for an extra 15% overall damage - this is a horrible tradeoff, and it's the same for every boss that is predominantly single target with sporadic AoE. You could run some AoE talents, but you're always losing far too much single target damage for it and the AoE damage you gain is way too small.

This issue was masked early on in 10.0.7 by the incredibly high tuning of the spec at the time, where even if you did run some AoE talents your overall damage was so high regardless that it didn't leave you competing with the tank on priority damage. Now that Ret is a regular mortal spec, this has become a severe deficiency in all aspects of PvE. For the second season in a row now, Ret is the DPS spec that loses the most single target damage in order to use its AoE talents in the game.

This isn't to say that there was nothing positive added in the talent tree during the rework - I do still like a lot of it, but when the issues are so noticeable and yet so ignored, they will overshadow the "that's kinda neat" talents. I do not think the new talent tree could be considered a success in its current state.

• Playstyle

Just from the perspective of "is it fun to press your buttons", the rework was a massive improvement. The old version of Ret had most of its damage concentrated in very rigid cooldown windows, where you'd basically just press the same buttons in the same sequences every time. This left the regular rotational buttons like Crusader Strike, Judgment, and Blade of Justice feeling pretty bad to press, since they did almost no damage by themselves. Although cooldowns do still dominate your overall damage, which I'll talk more about later, your regular rotational buttons now feel significantly more impactful, as though they actually contribute meaningfully to your damage instead of just being gap fillers.

That said, the playstyle overall is very different in a lot of respects to how Ret used to play. The number of charges your abilities have, the amount of Holy Power they generate, the amount of Holy power you spend, even having constant passive generation from Crusading Strikes and not using Crusade - these all result in a spec that feels very different to the version of Ret from previous expansions. I don't dislike changes to a spec in general, but change for change's sake isn't in itself a positive thing, and I think a step back towards the older versions would be an overall improvement, even if it's just more active talent tuning to adjust the difference between talent builds. For example, Templar Strikes is much closer in playstyle to the older versions of Ret, but it's noticeably weaker than Crusading Strikes due to a bug with its GCD and Crusading Strikes not needing Windfury Totem.

• Skill Expression

With the rework, Ret became a much easier spec to play. I don't consider this an inherently bad thing - Ret has always been a spec that had a much higher rate of play at lower difficulty content than it did at high levels, so keeping a spec with broad casual appeal easy to learn seems like a reasonable decision to make.

The issue I have is that although Ret is easy to learn at a basic level, there's also very little you can do to optimize playing it past that point. As long as you understand the basics, anyone can perform close to optimally while playing Ret. As a player trying to improve at the game, there's little additional reward for putting effort in. Even consistent Holy Power wastage just doesn't have a prominent negative effect on damage anymore.

It's difficult to pinpoint the exact reasons this has happened, but there's a few things that I think have contributed to this state. Firstly, the current rate of Holy Power generation and spending. Ret has historically been a spec where managing Holy Power was the core focus, where you'd try to find optimal windows to spend it in order to maximize your generation. At the moment, Ret's generation is either far too much or far too little:

• Inside cooldowns, Holy Power generation is extremely high. Divine Resonance and Boundless Judgment, along with having access to 2 charges of Hammer of Wrath and Wake of Ashes mean that even if you manage Holy Power poorly, you'll have plenty of buttons to still press.
• Outside of cooldowns, Holy Power generation is low. You only have Judgment and Blade of Justice to manage outside of the rare Hammer of Wrath proc to use, which makes using them on cooldown extremely trivial.

Vanguard of Justice has also contributed similarly by increasing the volume of Holy Power that you can spend further. Small inefficiencies aren't punished to the same extent as they used to be, since a player playing optimally inside cooldowns will still do about the same damage as someone playing slightly suboptimally, since there's no rotational gaps inside cooldowns anymore and most generators are much closer in damage to spenders now.

• Damage Tuning

The result of Ret being both easy to learn and having little to optimize makes tuning it a nightmare. It's a common perception among the playerbase at large that Ret is a fairly strong spec, yet the higher end community will often have the opposite impression. To illustrate this, take a look at the overall DPS statistics on Warcraftlogs in 10.2 as an example:

• At 50% in Normal Amirdrassil, Ret is the highest performing DPS spec. At 95%, it's 15th.
• At 50% in Heroic Amirdrassil, Ret is 7th. At 95%, it's 20th.
• At 50% in Mythic Amirdrassil, Ret is 19th. At 95%, it's 20th.

If you're an average normal raider, it's true for you that Ret is a high performing spec. The statistics back that up. But for anyone raiding at a higher level than that, Ret's value quickly dropped off a cliff, going from a slightly above average spec for the average Heroic raider to comfortably near the bottom for better Heroic raiders or most Mythic raiders. So if you think that Ret needed buffs, it's probably because of the higher difficulty content you do; conversely, if you think that Ret was already overtuned, it's probably because you're only exposed to Ret performing at low difficulty content. With the most recent buffs in 10.2.5, Ret is now a solidly above-average spec in Mythic Amirdrassil, but as a result is clearly overtuned in lower difficulties.

As it stands, there's no magical sweet spot that can exist where Ret is tuned properly for all player groups. This isn't an issue that can be simply fixed by tuning, there needs to be some redesign done to allow for better players to harness their skill to do more damage, so that buffs won't cause it to grossly overperform at low level content, or a lack of buffs cause it to underperform everywhere else.

Post-Rework

There's a common feeling among the Retribution community that our spec has been ignored since the rework. Although it fixed problems at the time, none of the new issues introduced by this rework have been adequately addressed in the year since. Here's a list of all changes Ret has received since 10.0.7 that I could find listed, not including healing/mana changes or regular bug fixes:

• 10.0.7 - April 6/7th: All damage reduced by 3%. Instrument of Retribution duration reduced to 9 seconds (was 12 seconds). Execution Sentence’s functionality has changed due to it not working in certain situations as expected. The payoff portion of Execution Sentence will no longer receive damage modifiers. To compensate for this, 30% (up from 20%) of the damage you deal during Execution Sentence is now accumulated and dealt as damage when Execution Sentence triggers.
(li>10.1 - May 2nd: Seal of the Crusader damage increased by 100%.
• 10.1.5 - July 11th: All ability damage increased by 2%.
• 10.1.5 - August 8th: Divine Storm damage increased by 8%. Wake of Ashes damage increased 10%. Consecration damage increased 12%.
• 10.2 - November 7th: Blade of Vengeance now functions as an addition to your single target Blade of Justice rather than replacing it.
• 10.2 - November 14th: All ability damage increased by 3%.
• 10.2 - December 19th: All ability damage increased by 3%.
• 10.2.5 - January 23rd: Wake of Ashes damage increased by 20%. Truth’s Wake damage increased by 28%. Seething Flames damage increased by 28%. Blade of Justice damage increased by 20%. Final Verdict damage increased by 10%.

The most recent buffs have only just been announced as I'm writing this post - with these, the total number of specific ability changes Ret has received in the year since the rework has doubled.

Most of these changes are arguably lazy flat buffs or nerfs to all abilities in an attempt to address overall performance. For the situations where there have been targeted changes, they're either largely AoE buffs as is the case with the August 8th buffs or single target buffs like the January 23rd buffs. The only change made that seems to have been directly in response to feedback about the spec's problems was the change to Blade of Vengeance when the Season 3 tier set bonus was announced. None of the other changes seem to have been made with any level of understanding of the challenges Ret actually faces, they're kneejerk buffs or nerfs to either the entire spec or to one half of it due to it overperforming or underperforming on some generic metric.

Looking Ahead

For The War Within, Ret definitely has a ton of potential. All the pieces for a successful spec are there - strong defensive capabilities, useful group support thanks to the insane Paladin utility toolkit including decent offhealing, a fun playstyle that can be adapted in a few different ways depending on the new tier sets or systems that get introduced. As long as the talent build and skill expression issues are addressed, and tuning is appropriate, I think Ret could be in for a great expansion. If they aren't, I think we'll continue to see more of the same - a spec that sees high levels of play among the playerbase at large, but not at more competitive levels.

• Talent Builds

We need to be able to use our AoE talents when the situation calls for it instead of being permanently pigeonholed into single target builds in raid. We need to be able to compete properly on boss damage without giving up huge amounts of AoE damage in Mythic+. While a comprehensive talent tree review could fix that, there are a couple of other strategies that could work instead. For example, nerfing the talents that are specific to single target builds like Execution Sentence or Divine Arbiter and moving that damage into baseline abilities shared among all builds would allow for those talents to be dropped at a much lower cost to priority damage. Similarly, nerfing the generic talents in the middle section of the tree that you drop for Tempest of the Lightbringer or Blessed Champion would also work - specifically, Divine Wrath, Vanguard of Justice, and Rush of Light. Something like reducing Blessed Champion from costing 2 talent points to 1 would reduce the number of talent points you'd spend on talents that only have value in AoE and do nothing in single target. Yet another option would be to generalize some of the talents that are exclusive to single target or AoE, for example letting Rush of Light proc off of Divine Storm or letting Tempest of the Lightbringer also echo Final Verdict at a further reduced amount. There's countless ways this issue could be addressed, but it just needs a scrap of attention to get it done.

• Tuning

Some work definitely needs to be done to address skill expression for Ret. Beyond players feeling adequately rewarded for investing effort into improving at the game, it's clearly had an adverse impact on how the spec can be tuned when some players constantly feel like Ret is far too strong while others feel that it's still too weak, and both are completely correct. When different parts of the community experience a spec as being tuned completely differently, it heavily restricts the ability of developers to tune it - tune it high as it was in 10.0.7, and it completely dominates lower difficulty content. Tune it low as it was in 10.1 or 10.2, and it's permanently at the bottom of Mythic raid statistics at high percentiles. Changes need to be made to allow for tuning to be effective for all sections of the playerbase.

• Hero Talents

The Hero talent trees in The War Within for Retribution are Templar and Herald of the Sun, which are presumably shared with Protection and Holy respectively. In the worst case scenario, I could see these leaning into the Holystrike/Radiant theming already present in the Ret tree, further cementing the single target/AoE build dichotomoy. In the best case, they'd provide some more offhealing or group utility capabilities, with a couple of small passive bonuses that might be a little better or worse for one specific build than another, but wouldn't elevate one build far above the rest. I don't particularly want to see more active abilities, since Ret already has plenty of rotational buttons and cooldowns, and cooldown bloat has been an issue for the spec in the past with Seraphim, but there's definitely still design space for interesting passive abilities that interact positively with the rest of your gameplay loop.

About the Author

Hi, I'm Bolas. I've played Ret since WotLK, I'm a mod in the Paladin class discord, and I help with some of the work on SimC for Ret. You can find me on Twitter or in the Hammer of Wrath discord if you have any questions or are interested in more information about Retribution.

Now is the time to conquer the content that came with the Guardians of the Dream update! From running  Mythic+ dungeons to slaughtering the mighty new bosses of the fresh Amirdrassil raid - all of that and beyond is one click away with WowCarry and its team of pro-players that will carry you through your journey!